1345: For the Sake of Strangers | Dorianne Laux
"For the Sake of Strangers"
Dorianne Laux
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy give me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another - a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees,
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them -
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
On this day in...
2010: "The Everlasting Staircase" by Jeffrey McDaniel
2009: "Loneliness" by Rainer Maria Rilke
2008: "the suicide kid" by Charles Bukowski
2007: Weekend, no poem
Play like/you are alive, even if it is not true.
Dorianne Laux
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy give me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another - a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees,
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them -
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
On this day in...
2010: "The Everlasting Staircase" by Jeffrey McDaniel
2009: "Loneliness" by Rainer Maria Rilke
2008: "the suicide kid" by Charles Bukowski
2007: Weekend, no poem
Play like/you are alive, even if it is not true.